Wednesday, May 16, 2012

16th May, 2012: This is not something the people of Bengal
had bargained for when they bought the slogan of “paribortan” advanced by the
TMC-Congress combine and decided to end 34 years of uninterrupted reign of the
Left Front. Killings, arson, rape, molestation, physical assaults on women,
forcible collection of money, eviction from land -- have all become a daily
occurrence. It does not surprise them anymore. Slowly but surely, people have
started comparing the current dispensation with the dreaded period of the
seventies, when the state witnessed semi-fascist terror. Will the state fall
back to those days is an apprehension being shared by more and more people.

Between the period May 14, 2011 when the TMC
combine assumed office to May 12, 2012, as many as 65 Left Front leaders,
activists and supporters have been brutally killed by TMC goons. 4904 persons had
to be hospitalized on account of the injuries sustained in such attacks.

The steep rise in the overall crime graph
points to the general deterioration in the law and order situation during the
past one year, since the TMC combine assumed office. 40,124 people have been
evicted from their homes. It is estimated that an amount of around Rs. 28
crores has been forcibly collected from 9529 persons.

There has been an alarming increasing in the
number of rape cases. 23 cases of rape have been reported from different parts
of the state during the past one year. Apart from this, there has also been an
overall rise in the incidents of atrocities against women. During the first
year of the TMC regime, and shamefully with a lady at the helm, 517 cases of
molestation of women and 790 cases of physical assault on women have been reported.
One of these cases pertains to the rape of a speech and hearing impaired girl
in Bankura by a resident doctor within the hospital premises. In an
overwhelming majority of these cases the culprits owe their allegiance to the
ruling TMC. Unfortunately, however, in many cases, the complainants have been
discredited, their character assassinated and motives assigned. In cases were
police officers have investigated independently and proceeded against the
culprits, they have been promptly transferred. The CM has had the cheek to call
these cases “politically motivated” or “fabricated”, even if it meant
tarnishing the image of the victim and defending the perpetrators of these
crimes.

There has been a planned and systematic attack
on land reforms implemented during the Left Front rule. Apart from 26,838 pata
holders and bargardars (who had received tenancy rights during the tenure of
Left Front government) who have been evicted from their lands, 3,418 peasants
are not being allowed to cultivate their own land.

The attack has now spread to democratic institutions
and the electoral process, besides the massive attack on the political
opponents of the TMC. Even the levels of
intolerance have seen a steady growth. The innocuous act of forwarding an email
containing a caricature of the Chief Minister saw a university professor,
Ambikesh Mahapatra landing behind bars. Newspapers and periodicals that a
library could subscribe to have all been listed and sent in an order to
libraries across the state. Boards put up by the Ganashakti daily have been
made a special target for attack. 250 of such boards on which the daily was
pasted for reading by the public who could not afford purchasing the paper,
have been destroyed. The democratic right to protest is also sought to be
curtailed. Another renowned professor, Partho Sarothi Ray was arrested and
jailed for taking part in a peaceful demonstration against eviction of slum
dwellers.

Since October 2011, 38 incidents of attacks
on the election process in different institutions in the state have been
reported. 84 student union offices have been captured by the student wing owing
allegiance to the TMC. Assault on students, teachers and staff in educational
institutions are increasing.

It is but natural that the brunt has been
borne by the CPI(M), the mass organisations under its leadership and its
partners in the Left Front. Apart from the 65 leaders and cadres of the Left
who have been mercilessly killed, 611 offices of the CPI(M) have been ransacked
and captured. 217 offices of the mass organisations have been captured in
different parts of the state. 14 Party conferences at various levels were
attacked. 3293 persons have been arrested on the basis of false and fabricated
cases being foisted on them. Arms are being planted in houses and offices of
the Party and in subsequent raids “recoveries” are reported. The reported
number of such cases is 169.

Besides, there has been a sharp increase in
the number of kidnappings, looting of shops, dismantling of elected three tier
panchayat bodies or forcible resignation of elected representatives.

But this is not all. In the seven month
period between October 12, 2011 and May 12, 2011, agricultural distress has led
53 peasants to commit suicide, which the government is not ready to admit.(INN)

Post
Poll Violence perpetrated by AITC and INC miscreants against CPI(M) & Left
Front activists in West Bengal as reported from May 14, 2011 to May 12, 2012

At a
glance

1

Killed

65

2

Abetted to commit suicide

12

3

Peasant suicides (from October 12, 2011)

53

4

Rape

23

5

Molestation

517

6

Physical assault on women

790

7

Injured & hospitalized

4904

8

Evicted from house

40124

9

Ransacked, looted & burnt

2867

10

CPI(M) office ransacked & captured

611

11

Attack on Party conferences

14 (from November 2011)

12

Mass organisations & trade union
offices captured

217

13

Attack on the election process in different
institutions

38 (from October 2011)

14

Student Union offices captured

84

15

Ganashakti Board destroyed

250

16

Pre-planned so called `arms recovery’

169

17

Arrest on false and fabricated cases

3293

18

Forcefully collection of money. No – amount

9529 (+) Nos – 27 crore 87 lac 8 thousand

19

Not allowed to cultivate own land. No –
Acre

3418 (+) Nos – 9222.73 Acre

20

Eviction of Patta Holder & Bargader. No
– Acre

26838 (+) Nos – 9404.13

* Apart from the above statement, the
incidents like kidnapping, assault on students-teachers-staffs, ransacking
educational institutions, looting of shops, dismantling of elected three tier
panchayat, forcing to resign from the elected bodies are not enlisted.

Friday, May 4, 2012

West
Bengal’s populist chief minister is doing badly. Yet she typifies shifts in
power in India

THE
ECONOMIST, Apr 21st 2012 | from the print edition

BUYER’S
remorse is common enough in the dusty markets of Kolkata, a delightful if
crumbling great city, once known as Calcutta and still capital of the state of
West Bengal. Those who buy cheap plastic goods or plaster-of-Paris busts of
Rabindranath Tagore, Bengal’s cultural hero, may come to regret their haste.
Likewise, many who voted in last year’s state election. Sickened by 34 years of
wretched Communist rule, they handed power to Mamata Banerjee and her party,
the Trinamool Congress. The sense of regret is palpable.

Her faults
are not the usual ones. She appears honest; home remains a two-storey
whitewashed box in a humble bit of Kolkata, wedged between a fetid river and a
tumbledown bakery. Her passions are not accumulating Ferraris but landscape
painting and poetry. A prominent Bengali businessman praises her energy and
direct manner, forgiving her much as she struggles with a dire legacy. The
state is India’s most indebted, and, despite a little spurt in the Communists’
relatively reformist final years, enjoys little development beyond Kolkata,
which has sprouted a property boom and outposts of India’s outsourcing empires.

One set
of complaints (Bengalis are talented, versatile grumblers) is over her style.
“Mindset of a Stalinist”, a journalist concludes. Cabinet colleagues “live in
mortal terror”, a senior party figure says. Her rule is “a one-man army”, a
young critic jeers. An autocratic bent leads to grotesque blunders. She claimed
that a victim of gang rape was conspiring to discredit her rule, and punished a
bright policewoman who caught the assailants. Then this month she failed to
disavow the arrest of two academics, one of whom was beaten. He had merely
shared a cartoon about her on Facebook and by e-mail. This suggested that she
cannot take even mild criticism. So does the alleged banning of newspapers she
dislikes from public libraries. Aveek Sarkar, a tycoon whose media group is
critical, expects her to order his arrest: he has lodged “anticipatory bail” in
eight as yet imaginary cases.

Defenders
claim she is growing in the job, for which a few years as a minister in Delhi
running the railways (badly) failed to prepare her. Derek O’Brien, her
Anglo-Indian spokesman, claims somewhat limply that “you haven’t seen the best
of Mamata yet”. Complaints about her style seem mainly confined to the urban
elite. A bigger concern is what she does with power. She has notched up one
success: cracking down on Maoist insurgents in their rural base. Otherwise,
things look grim. Most worrying, her economic policies outflank even the
Communists on the left. Trinamool, which means grassroots, won after she led a
campaign against plans by Tata, India’s biggest firm, to build a car factory on
land she claimed was taken unfairly from farmers. Tata fled to a friendlier
state, Gujarat, taking jobs, but voters cheered.

A
populist not an ideologue, Ms Banerjee’s success reflects a long-term trend
across India: the rise of regional parties at the expense of the national ones.
Poorer, less educated, rural people (“theLumpen! the Luddites!” an educated
Bengali sighs, in his plush office), who vote in greater numbers than the
wealthier minority, seem increasingly to prefer local parties, often, at least
in the north, with a statist bent. Ms Banerjee’s political approach is to dish
out public jobs and welfare and protect small farmers, and to duck reforms that
might lure investors to the state. Her government did recently pass a law
allowing business to lease modest plots of public land. Yet she vows loudly
never to help industry buy it. And with land titles a confused mess of
fragmented ownership, it is likely that land-hungry firms will stay away.

More
energy is devoted to symbols and aesthetics. The state has a new name, “Paschim
Banga”. And Ms Banerjee seems to think the way to lure tourists to Kolkata is
to paint every railing, kerbside, public urinal, roundabout and bridge in
blue-and-white stripes. She has also ordered that loudspeakers blast Tagore’s
music at junctions in the city, while Marx is purged from the school
curriculum. Yet she will not go to business forums, and rejects meetings with
ambassadors hoping to promote industry ties. The state’s budget last month
reimposed a barmy entry tax on goods from elsewhere in India. That will distort
trade but raise almost no revenue. Then this week Infosys, a big software firm,
put on hold a development centre that would have created over 10,000 jobs. Ms
Banerjee refused to allow a special economic zone offering tax relief.

All this
will prove costly, in time. Farmers alone produce too little tax revenue to pay
for planned roads, electricity, schools and hospitals. All her government’s
revenue goes to pay salaries and interest on its 2 trillion-rupee ($40 billion)
debt. That leaves Ms Banerjee with a single destructive strategy: begging and threatening
the central government in Delhi in order to secure debt relief. As a crucial
ally of the ruling Congress party, she is in a strong position. But the finance
minister, Pranab Mukherjee, is her main Bengali rival, and he refuses special
help. The result is paralysis for West Bengal and India. She helps block the
government’s reforms—on foreign investment in supermarkets; cutting fuel
subsidies; the railways budget; a water-sharing deal with Bangladesh; an
anti-graft bill. But she gets no relief.

Follow
the blue-and-white brick road

The
stand-off will continue. Congress wants its candidate elected as India’s
president in July, and will need her help. She and some other state leaders
want to wrest more powers from the centre, notably by scuppering a planned
national counter-terrorism body. As the ruling coalition’s spoiler-in-chief,
she typifies rising regional clout at a time when the centre is weakly led. Her
party talks grandly of a concept of “operative federalism”, meaning that states
should get more control of public funds. So the tensions with Congress will
rise. But nobody expects her to fly away from its coalition soon. She may be
seen as a mischief-maker; but, at least as yet, not quite as the wicked witch
of the East.

An issue a day keeps boredom at bay  this could well be the
guiding principle of West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee these days.

MID-DAY, April 16
07:35:58, 2012

KOLKATA, Agencies

How else does one explain her government
regularly dishing out controversies on a platter to her political opponents?
The baton charging of women protesting eviction from a slum by male police, the
arrest of those agitating against the assault, muscle flexing by ruling
Trinamool Congress (TMC) men vis-a-vis a small but feisty human rights group
close to Banerjee’s Kalighat residence — the unending chain of events in a
short span of time has triggered much condemnation from across society.

You’re joking!
Ambikesh Mahapatra, who allegedly forwarded the Mamata cartoons, was
booked for outraging the modesty of a woman, defamation, and hacking

However, the midnight arrest of a Jadavpur
University professor and a septuagenarian retired engineer in connection with
the online circulation of a cartoon strip which the authorities saw as defaming
Banerjee, or ‘Didi’ as she is popularly known, was the icing on the cake. The
collage of cartoons allegedly forwarded by physical chemistry professor
Ambikesh Mahapatra included the photographs of Banerjee and Railway Minister
Mukul Roy and used some dialogues of filmmaker Satyajit Ray’s Bengali detective
masterpiece Sonar Kella.

It showed the two TMC leaders discussing how to
get rid of party leader Dinesh Trivedi. Subrata Sengupta, a former Public Works
Department engineer, was taken into custody, as Mahapatra had sent the cartoons
from the registered e-mail id of the housing cooperative of which Sengupta was
secretary. The mail account had been opened in Sengupta’s name.

But what was more laughable were the charges.
The duo was booked for outraging the modesty of a woman, defamation and
hacking. Though the professor and the retired engineer got bail from the court,
there was a distinct similarity in the modus operandi in their case as also
that involving the attack on the human rights group.

The Association for Protection of Democratic
Rights (APDR) activists, intending to take out a pre-announced procession, were
first roughed up by youths allegedly close to TMC. Within minutes, police,
instead of taking action against the culprits, arrested the APDR people.
Mahapatra was also first allegedly beaten up by TMC men and forced to write out
a signed statement that he had circulated the cartoon “motivatedly” as he was a
CPI-Marxist activist. And then police swung into action based on a complaint by
someone who does not even have an e-mail account to take the professor and the
retired, ailing engineer into custody.

After their release, Mahapatra filed a counter
complaint, and buckling under the storm of protests, four of the youths were
arrested. But they were bailed out within hours. Now there is a fresh angle to
the story. It has been reported that those who attacked Mahapatra were members
of a building material suppliers’ syndicate with links to the TMC. It is being
said that bills worth Rs 17 lakh submitted by suppliers were being withheld by
the housing society which doubted how genuine these were. Mahapatra is
assistant secretary of the cooperative. Meanwhile Banerjee appears unfazed.
While she defended the arrests, a source close to her said, “This will not have
any impact on her support base, as very few people are bothered with Facebook
and Twitter.”

In the
summer of 2001, it was evident as I travelled through West Bengal that fatigue
had set in with the Left Front government. Earlier, in end-2000, anticipating
the public mood, Communist Party of India (Marxist) veteran Jyoti Basu had
stepped down as Chief Minister, paving the way for Buddhadeb Bhattacharya. This
ensured the Left victories in 2001 and 2006.

The Left
extended its life by a decade not merely because Mr. Bhattacharya gave it a new
look but also because the only option before the people was Mamata Banerjee. Ms
Banerjee leading her three-year-old Trinamool Congress, didn't seem capable of
serious governance. I recall many conversations in Kolkata: yes, Bengal needs a
change, but Didi simply can't be trusted to govern the State. If her trajectory
as an opposition leader is clearly the stuff legends are made of, her forays
into government — as Minister of State for Youth and Sports in the P.V.
Narasimha Rao government (1991-93) and as Union Minister for Railways in the
Atal Bihari Vajpayee government (1999-2001) — had been less than inspiring.

That
scepticism turned into burning impatience with the Left government a year after
it returned to power in 2006. If the anti-land acquisition agitations in
Nandigram and Singur saw a rural uprising against the Left Front, the latter's
inability to contain the situation and the human rights violations ensured that
Kolkata's vocal middle class, from club-goingboxwallastojhola-carrying
intellectuals, all signed up forporiborton.

Censorship,
arrest

But today,
a month short of celebrating a year in power, Ms Banerjee's honeymoon with the
opinion-making middle class is over, the shroud of censorship she has flung
across the State proving to be the last straw. The watershed moment was the
arrest of a Jadavpur University chemistry professor Ambikesh Mahapatra on
charges of violating the modesty of a woman, spreading social ill will and
disrupting social harmony, merely for sharing a cartoon online. Later, it
transpired that Dr. Mahapatra, as assistant secretary of the New Garia
Development Cooperative Housing Society — where he lives — had blocked the
Trinamool-backed syndicate's contracts to supply building materials, earning
the wrath of the party's goon squads.

This
episode has galvanised the middle class, especially the intellectuals who had
jumped the Left Front ship for the Trinamool. Result: a Twitter campaign,
“Arrest me if you dare, Mamata Bannerjee,” and an online petition on Facebook
mobilising support against the government's actions. R.K. Laxman's “The Common
Man,” mouth sealed with two strips of bandage, and a graphic of a male face,
hands covering the eyes and mouth, adorn these accounts. Unfazed, the State CID
has asked Facebook to delete morphed images of Ms Banerjee, after a Trinamool
supporter complained that “objectionable comments” were flooding social
networking sites. Since then, a group of intellectuals has written to Prime
Minister Manmohan Singh condemning the Mahapatra episode that came on the heels
of another arrest — that of molecular biologist Partha Sarathi Ray who had in
April joined a protest against the eviction of slum dwellers in east Kolkata.
The signatories include Noam Chomsky, Mriganka Sur and Abha Sur of the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, top scientists from the IITs and
institutions in Denmark, Singapore and Sweden, as well as activists like Aruna
Roy and Nikhil Dey.

Unperturbed

But Ms
Banerjee remains unperturbed: for her, in an odd reversal of the State's
politics, these are her “class enemies” — the elitist English speaking middle
class, whom she referred to in an interview she gave last month to NDTV; those
who, she said, have contempt for her humble origins.

As Chief
Minister, she has made it clear she will not tolerate a differing view, much
less dissent, within her party or government — or, indeed, far more troubling,
in the State. If Mr. Dinesh Trivedi was unceremoniously sacked as Union Railway
Minister for not toeing her line on the Union Railway budget, Damayanti Sen,
the feisty, young Joint Commissioner of Police, Kolkata, who cracked the Park
Street rape case, was shunted out to an obscure job for proving Ms Banerjee
wrong: her first response to the rape charge and, indeed, news of infant cradle
deaths, was that they had been “manufactured to malign her government.”

Newspaper
issue

Now that
intolerance has spread to the wider world: last month, government libraries
were told to purchase only eight newspapers — those taken off the list were
those critical of her actions and policies, as they prevented “freethinking”
among readers. In future, she said, she might even ask people to stop buying
certain newspapers “because a conspiracy is going on against us.” The
newspapers that offended her included the top-sellingAnanda Bazaar Patrika,The
TelegraphandBartaman: interestingly,Bartaman, whose strident
anti-Left stance played a leading role in bringing the Trinamool to power, is
now running stories highly critical of Ms Banerjee. Later, under pressure, five
newspapers — a Nepali daily, two Bengali dailies, andThe Times of India— were restored to the “government”
list. An embarrassed Library Services Minister Abdul Karim Chowdhary said the
government had not imposed censorship or banned the big papers, it only wished
to promote small newspapers.

But to the
“freethinking” reading public, it is more than apparent that those that made
the cut in the first list were all pro-government: one such Bengali newspaper
is owned by a Trinamool Rajya Sabha MP, whose associate editor, Kunal Ghosh, is
among the three journalists recently elected to the upper house of Parliament
on the party ticket. For Ms Banerjee, the switch from goddess-status to a daily
scrutiny of her actions has been a rude shock, as all through her opposition
years, she depended heavily on media support. Today, it's well-known in
Kolkata's political circles that she looks to a chosen group of journalists,
including the new Rajya Sabha MPs, rather than her political colleagues, for
advice on all issues.

Unfortunately,
for her, some of these “advisers” are now coming under the scanner as one of
them works for a chain of media outfits backed by a chit fund, the subject of
an ongoing controversy. Last September, Trinamool MP Somen Mitra wrote to Dr.
Singh, urging action against chit funds channelling money into real estate,
film production, the hotel business — and the media. He also alleged that these
chit funds were prospering, thanks to political patronage, with some owners
even in Parliament. Last month, Congress MP A.H. Khan Chowdhury wrote a similar
letter to Dr. Singh, asking for an investigation into the activities of these
chit funds. Indeed, the link between hot money and media organisations backing
Ms Banerjee's government is now an open secret in Kolkata.

In the
dying days of the Left Front government in West Bengal, the CPI (M)'sharmad
sena,or goon squads
rampaging through its villages, came to symbolise its 34 years. Today, those
goon squads have switched political allegiance to her Trinamool. If the
violence continues unabated — with the Left now at the receiving end —
intolerance of any criticism of the new government has added a fresh dimension
to the State's politics.“Harmad
theke unmad(from unmitigated
violence to untempered madness”) is the despairing phrase most used on
Kolkata's streets to describe the prevailing situation in Bengal.

The middle
class that turned the tide of public opinion in the Trinamool's favour is
angry.

Writer
Mahasweta Devi, among those who had backed Ms Banerjee, recently said:
“Dictatorship has never worked. It has neither worked in Hitler's Germany nor
did it work in Mussolini's Italy.” Ms Banerjee needs to heed those words: for
even if her popularity is still intact in rural Bengal, recent events represent
the thin end of the wedge.